Ye GODS...

I just got back from "Twilight: New Moon".

Yes. Yes, obviously I know better.

The whole thing started as an experiment: my best friend Anita insisted that if you view the work of Stephanie Meyer as a comedy, and assume the horrifically awkward and over-the-top aspects are completely intentional, you can actually enjoy it as a send-up of Anne Rice.

So we had free tickets and figured we might as well give it a try; at the very least we could provide a running commentary in the style of Waldorf and Statler. And since we checked the theatre on the day of the screening and it seemed pretty empty, the plan was set.

Ominous Portent #1: The theatre was bloody packed when we got there.

Ominous Portent #2: We were surrounded on all sides not by prepubescent girls, as I'd thought, but 20-plus-year-old women and three men who were very obviously over 40, and as later events would show, they weren't there for the same reasons Anita and I were.

So the film starts with the social exploits of Bella, and almost immediately both Ani and I agreed that if we knew this girl in real life we'd thrash the living daylights out of her. A complete shrew to anyone and everyone who shows her the slightest bit of consideration, Bella is precisely the type of person who deserves to be utterly alone.

Of course, as we said, the point was to try and recontextualize the film as a comedy, and I have to admit that we both started laughing when we interpreted Bella's desire to become a vampire as basically admitting that she didn't have a soul to begin with so it wasn't much of a change for her. That and the whole "I want to come / I don't want you to come" had us in tears ten minutes into the movie.

And then things got ugly.

A woman sitting next to Anita - thirty-five if she was a day, so help me God - leans over and asks us very pointedly to shut up so she can enjoy the movie.

A 35-year-old woman is taking this movie seriously.

Naturally, we flipped her the bird and kept going - normally we're not those types of people, but by then we couldn't help it: Bella sits in a chair for three months? Anita actually choked on popcorn at that point. Bella tries to compliment her Native American friend by telling him he's "kinda beautiful"? I'm reasonably sure I turned purple by then, tears in my eyes, whispering as quietly as I could to Anita that Cher called and she wanted her hair back (which pretty much sent her into an epileptic fit).

At which point one of those older gentlemen I'd mentioned got up, turned to face us and roared to shut the fuck up.

So we left.

I guess the moral of the story is that "Twilight" can be hilarious if you look at it from A Certain Point of View (tm Obi-Wan Kenobi), but for best effect, do not watch it with diehard fans. For some reason, they tend to take this very seriously.

And as an aside? This justifies the existence of Youtube. That is all.